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Monday, 26 March 2012

Rethinking Healing at Short Rests

I've recently come to the conclusion that the current rules for healing during short rests are not achieving their goals. The goals of the healing and associated gameplay are:
• Allow characters to heal some damage during the course of an adventure day, and all damage overnight
• Gradually deplete the characters' Health Points and Anima over the course of multiple encounters.
• Encourage players to engage in multiple combat encounters each adventure day by offering additional XP (double) for each encounter after the first.

To support these goals, the healing rules are:

Rule: Characters increase their current Health and Anima by half of their maximum at a Short Rest.Rule: Characters can use Healing Powers during a Short Rest.Rule: Characters recover all of their Health and Anima at a Long Rest.

As the rules are currently written, the characters recover half of their Health Points and Anima during a short (1 hour) rest between encounters. This means that unless the characters are reduced to below half of their totals for HP or Anima, they will recover all the way to full during these rests.

In order to achieve the goal of a gradual depletion of their health and to stop characters from recovering to full health points during a short rest, I am going to change the wording (but not the intent) of the short rest healing, thus:

Rule: Characters increase their current Health and Anima by half of their maximum at a Short Rest.

Becomes:

Rule: At a short rest, characters increase their current Health and Anima by half the amount that they are depleted.

With this change, the characters' Health Points and Anima will never return to full once depleted.